[texhax] LaTeX - sample letters

[cga2000]

On Mon, Jul 31, 2006 at 02:13:57PM EDT, William Adams wrote:
> On Jul 31, 2006, at 12:10 PM, cga2000 wrote:
> 
First off, I cannot remember if you or Karl directed me to this list
but this is definitely more what I was looking for.

> > Where could I find letter samples that I could use for templates?
> 
> First, off, there's a page on this in the FAQ:
> 
> http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=letterclass
> 
My browser says I visited this link -- but due to all the stuff I have
read lately, I have absolutely no recollection.

> A quick search reveals there's a sample letter documentclass as a  
> part of standard LaTeX if memory serves.
> 
> Here's page on it:
> 
> http://www.maths.ox.ac.uk/help/faqs/latex/letters.shtml
> 
> and some docs.

This looks excellent.  What I was hoping to find was a sort of "letter
showcase" where you could view a collection of different style letters
and choose the one(s) that you might find suitable .. download the .tex
files and use them as templates.

I'm unsure what a "package" actually means in LaTeX parlance.  For
instance I recently found one that's already installed on this debian
system and the way this works is really quite different from anything I
have seen before: 

You just add a:

\usepackage{nopageno}

in your preamble 

.. and page numbering magically disappear from your entire document..!

I try to think of a LaTeX package as a style file but obviously there is
more to it than that.

Another source of confusion where I am concerned is that I am never
sure whether a given LaTeX package is already installed and if not,
what *debian* package it might be a part of. 

What I did to try and find letter samples that might already installed
on my laptop was a:

$ locate letter | grep tex

.. pretty lame but that was the only thing I could think of.

There is a texdoc command that's already installed on this box but
using it effectively is only possible if you already know the
name of a particular package.

I probably need to find some debian doc relative to TeX/LaTeX since
many of my current problems seem to be more related to packaging issues
than LaTeX proper. I am concerned I might download packages from CTAN
that may be incompatible with my base LaTeX install and end up damaging
my system.

Maybe I need to do a non-debian install of TeX/LaTeX in /usr/local or
my home directory and just use that instead that the one that came with
my distro.  
> 
> > I am mostly looking for samples of US "official" correspondence but I
> > would also be interested in their UK equivalent.
> >
> > Samples of correspondence in Spanish and French would also be of
> > interest.
> 
> I dunno if there're specific exemplars for these as a part of Babel  
> or no.
> 
> There was a Gnome front-end a while back though:
> 
> http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/help/Catalogue/entries/gtex-letter.html

Thanks, but I stopped using GUI's a few months back. The good thing is
that this came as a reminder that I had not looked into means of making
Vim a little more LaTeX-friendly and I just found a debian package
called "vim-latex-suite" that makes it a lot easier to work with .tex
files in Vim.  It does come with a small template collection .. but
unfortunately none for the "letter" document class.

Thanks

cga